Archaeology and genomics together with Indigenous knowledge revise the human-horse story in the American West. Few places in the world are more closely linked with horses in the popular imagination than the Great Plains…Horses first evolved in the Americas around 4 million years ago. Then they disappeared from the fossil record by about 10,000 years ago. Archaeological finds from the Yukon to the Gulf Coast now make it clear that horses were an important part of ancient lifeways for the early peoples of North America. A Lakota scientist who specializes in ancient horse genomics and is expert in Indigenous oral traditions about horses worked with a large team of scientists and scholars from around the world, including those from Pueblo, Pawnee, Comanche nations, and set out to see what archaeology, Indigenous knowledge systems and genomics together could tell us about the horse in the American West. The findings are validating oral traditions for many of the Native communities affected the study. Chief Joe American Horse is one of the study team members.
The battle for Mount Rushmore. ‘It should be turned into something like the Holocaust Museum’.
Mount Rushmore national memorial draws nearly 3 million visitors a year to its remote location in South Dakota. They travel from all corners of the globe just to lay their eyes on what the National Park Service calls America’s “shrine of democracy”. Phil Two Eagle is not opposed to the fact that the giant sculpture of American presidents is a major tourist attraction but he thinks the park should have a different focus: oppression. “It should be turned into something like the United States Holocaust Museum,” he said. “The world needs to know what was done to us.” Two Eagle, from Rosebud noted what historians have also documented. Hitler got some of his genocidal ideas for ethnic cleansing from 19th and early 20th century US policies against Native Americans.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.
